Month: July 2015

**Edit: There are now better ways to get kodi on a fire tv stick by using adbFire.**

During last week’s Amazon Prime Day, I picked up a Fire TV HDMI stick for cheap.

As far as media players go, I’ve got an HTPC running Kodi, an Asus Oplay Air, a Chromecast, and a Roku stick. For my use case, I mostly stream my own videos from a network share and for the longest time, the Oplay was the best media player for that. In fact, the Oplay is still the main media player in my living room even though it is old and slow and the interface is clunky. The Chromecast works, but I have to play everything through my phone or computer and that is a pain and the rest of the family can’t really deal with that. The Roku just wants me to subscribe and pay for everything and it looks like the Fire TV does too.

Looking around the internet, I found that you can sideload android apps on the Fire TV. So to turn the Fire TV into an actually useful media player, I installed the android version of Kodi. Now I can stream my local content.

To install Kodi on the Fire TV stick:

Go to System -> Developer -> Options

Enable ADB Debugging and Apps from Unknown Sources

Note the IP address for the Fire TV in the System -> About -> Network menu.

Grab arm android edition of Kodi from here.

Run the following commands:

adb kill-server

adb start-server

adb connect

adb install

The install is done when adb reports “success”.

To add Kodi to the Fire TV launcher menu. You must sideload llama with the same method as above.

Go to EVENTS and add a new event. In the event, select ADD CONDITION. From the menu select Active Application and select Choose App. Select the app that you want to use as the neew Kodi launcher. Then select ADD ACTION and select Run Application and select Kodi.

Now, when you launch whatever app you set as your launcher, it will now launch Kodi instead.

You can also edit the application thumbnail images through adb to add the Kodi logo to the launcher. You can find more info here.